Congress Needs to Take A Lesson From Hockey

By Michael Aneiro

Getty Images

Stop dropping the gloves for a change.

Here’s a thought for Washington amid its perpetual, ineffectual partisan bickering over the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling and every other dispute du jour impeding government and undermining markets: Hire a mediator.

This blogger and hockey fan awoke today to the surprise news that the National Hockey League had somehow reached an agreement ending the lockout that had postponed a season originally scheduled to start last October. Said lockout came a short eight years after the previous lockout that had cost the league an entire canceled season. Until this weekend, the current season had been canceled bit by bit and any salvage efforts for the remainder seemed increasingly like a lost cause. Now at least there will at least be a shortened season and, by terms of the agreement, at least another eight years before the next reprise.

How did the two sides put an end to this hockey fight? They hired a mediator. A guy by the name of Scot Beckenbaugh, deputy director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, who is being widely credited for accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of bridging the divide between the league’s owners and the players’ association.

While dusting off my New York Rangers jersey in renewed anticipation of a Stanley Cup run this year, I was going through my usual Sunday morning routine of watching Meet the Press, where the main topic was the deal that averted the fiscal cliff. Former Senator Alan Simpson, he of the Simpson-Bowles commission tasked with offering bipartisan recommendations for fiscal reform, lambasted the cliff deal for not saving the U.S. nearly enough money to fix its structural problems. Simpson said the deal’s failings came about because the two parties in Washington are simply more unwilling or unable to negotiate with each other than ever before.

“You can’t do the work of the Senate because the leaders won’t work together,” Simpson said, contrasting today’s impasse with his Senate days when Senators at least knew enough to do business with one another in the name of governance. “They don’t like each other.”

Former Maine governor and incoming independent Senator from that state, Angus King, chimed in, citing his recent introductory discussions with Senators from both parties and offering a lesson from the life of Abraham Lincoln as seen in the current Lincoln biopic.

“My peculiar status as an independent [meant] I could have frank discussions with both sides without being viewed as member of the enemy camp, [and] that’s a role I hope to play…. Lincoln got his hands dirty negotiating the 13th Amendment. And the president can’t do it by remote control.”

Next up was Carly Fiorina, former Republican Senate candidate in California and ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). ”I’ve negotiated many deals in my life and it takes a win-win [approach] with a respect for your opponent, not a win-lose with constant denigration of your opponent,” Fiorina said.

So everybody seems to be saying government could get back to business if only the leaders of both sides could move past partisan pride and posturing long enough to have respectful talks and arrive at some sort of workable accord, without feeling like they’ve abandoned their supporters and capitulated to the other side.

The sort of process enabled by, say, a third-party negotiator. A mediator.

It’s pathetic that D.C. has reached a point where the two sides could require a referee to get anything accomplished together. But if a mediator could cut through the dysfunction that is Gary Bettman’s NHL, surely it’s worth giving the idea a shot in Washington.

Amey Stone is Barron’s Income Investing blogger and Current Yield columnist. She was formerly a managing editor at CBS MoneyWatch, MSN Money and AOL DailyFinance. Her responsibilities included overseeing market coverage and personal finance topics. Prior to those roles, she was a senior writer at BusinessWeek where she authored the Street Wise column online and contributed to the magazine’s Inside Wall Street column. Topics covered included economics, corporate finance, Fed policy, municipal bonds, mutual funds and dividend investing. She co-authored King of Capital, a biography of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.